Dorothy Eggers: The Headless Body, the Bunion and the Car Sold to a Cop
On the morning of 2 January 1946, a couple of motorists stopped on the road up through Waterman Canyon in the San Bernardino Mountains. Down in the ravine below them was something wrapped in a green and white blanket and tied with rope. When deputies hauled it up, they found the body of a woman who'd been shot twice. Her head and hands were gone.
Whoever dumped her there knew exactly what they were doing. No face meant no photo match. No hands meant no fingerprints. It should have made her impossible to name. Instead, the case fell apart for the killer within three weeks, and it was his own paperwork, his shifting stories and one badly chosen buyer for a used car that did it.
Quick Answers
• Who was the victim? Dorothy Armand Lee Eggers, a 42-year-old woman from Temple City, a suburb east of Los Angeles.
• Who killed her? Her husband, Arthur Robert Eggers, a clerk at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Temple City substation.
• How was she identified? Her doctors matched a bunion on the body’s foot to treatment they’d given her.
• What gave him away? He sold her car to a deputy from his own office, who spotted blood in the trunk.
• What happened to him? He was convicted of first-degree murder and died in the gas chamber at San Quentin on 15 October 1948.
• Were her head and hands found? No. They were never recovered.
A Body With No Name
The woman in the ravine was middle-aged and tall, somewhere around five foot seven or eight. She'd been shot twice in the torso and one of the bullets had gone through her heart. Beyond that, there wasn't much for detectives to go on. Her head and hands had been cut off after death and they were nowhere to be found.
Later surveys of the case mostly agree on Waterman Canyon as the spot, though the California Supreme Court judgment only records a ravine just off a mountain highway in San Bernardino County. Either way, it was a long drive from Los Angeles, and that distance was the point.
That same afternoon, the best part of 60 miles away in Temple City, a man walked in to report his wife missing.
The Missing Person Report
Arthur Eggers was in his early fifties and worked as a clerk for the Los Angeles County Sheriff. He wasn't a detective, but he spent his days around them, and he'd have known exactly how a missing person report gets handled.
He told them his wife, Dorothy, hadn't been seen since the morning of 28 December. The timing jumped out straight away. News of a headless woman in the mountains was already in the papers, and here was a sheriff's employee filing a report on the very same day.
Then there was the description. Eggers gave Dorothy's height as five foot two, and on another occasion as five foot five. Everyone else who knew her put her at five seven or five eight. Getting your own wife's height wrong by half a foot is a strange mistake to make, unless you'd rather people didn't connect her to a tall body in a blanket.
The next day he drove out to San Bernardino, supposedly to view the body. He spoke to a deputy and then left without actually looking at it. Later he had the family's lodger ring Dorothy's brother-in-law to say it couldn't possibly be her, because the dead woman's feet were too big. In the words the court later recorded, they were “as big as Garbo’s.”
It was a weirdly specific thing to fixate on. And the feet were exactly what would hang him.
The Bunion That Gave Her Back Her Name
With no face and no fingerprints, investigators went looking for anything distinctive that had survived. The body had severe bunions. So detectives asked Dorothy's doctors whether she'd ever been treated for anything like that.
Caution, crime scene photo of Dorothy Eggers
She had. HISTORY’s account of the case says her doctors confirmed they'd treated her for a bunion that matched the foot on the body. Some later retellings add that a surgeon had operated on her feet and that a scar on her shin helped too, but the bunion is the detail every account comes back to.
It's a grim little irony. The killer took away the two things that would normally identify a body and left behind the one thing he probably never thought about. If you've read about Dr Crippen and the murder of Cora Crippen, you'll know he was undone in a similar way, by a patch of scarred skin among remains he thought nobody could ever name.
The woman in the blanket was Dorothy Eggers. Her husband's missing person report had just become a murder inquiry.
Life in the Temple City House
Dorothy and Arthur lived in Temple City with two of Dorothy's nieces, a teenager called Marie and a younger girl. A lodger named Loomis had rented the back room for more than two years. A Los Angeles Public Library photo of Dorothy’s mother, Mary Lee survives from the press coverage, a reminder that Dorothy had a family well beyond the version of her that her husband gave in court.
Most of what's been written about the marriage comes from Arthur himself. He told the jury things had been happy until about two years earlier, when he said Dorothy began going through the change of life. He also repeated rumours that she went to dances and met men. Plenty of later writers have taken all of that at face value. It's worth remembering that Dorothy never got to tell her side, and every one of those claims came from the man accused of killing her.
One detail from the court record feels far more ordinary. Just before she disappeared, the two of them rowed about a Christmas present for Loomis. Dorothy told her husband he was being a cheapskate. It's a tiny domestic snapshot from days before her death, and it's one of the few bits of her own voice that survives.
The Paperwork He Got Her to Sign
Not long before Dorothy vanished, Arthur got busy with the car. It was registered in Dorothy's name. He said she'd told him the ownership certificate had burned, so he got hold of a duplicate and had her sign it, along with a power of attorney he drew up himself.
His explanation in court was that he wanted to protect his share of the car in case something happened to her. Coming from a man on trial for killing her, it didn't do him any favours.
After Dorothy disappeared, the car went up for sale. Because the registration was still in her name, Arthur got his niece Marie to practise writing her aunt's signature. In the end he signed the ownership certificate himself at the Division of Motor Vehicles.
Blood in the Trunk
On 3 January, the day after the body was found, a witness saw Eggers scrubbing out the back compartment of his car. Then, roughly two weeks later, he sold it. Later accounts describe it as a 1940 Plymouth sedan.
Of all the people in Los Angeles County he could have sold it to, he picked a deputy from his own office. The new owner noticed small dried spots in the trunk that looked a lot like blood. Experts later found the trunk had been recently cleaned, but not well enough. Tiny traces of human blood were still there.
Once police started looking at the house, things got worse. Human blood turned up in the grease on the garage floor and in the bathroom. The blanket wrapped around the body was identified as belonging to the Eggers household.
Meanwhile, on 4 January, just two days after the body was found, Arthur had taken Dorothy's engagement and wedding rings to a jeweller and sold them for $10. He used a false name and a made-up address. Ten dollars for both rings. He wasn't after the money. He wanted them out of the house.
The Arrest, the Gun and the Saw
Arthur Eggers was arrested on 22 January 1946. In one of his statements he wrote out directions to where he'd thrown away a gun and a saw, and officers went and found both.
The gun was greasy and coated with human blood, tissue and fatty debris. A fragment of bone was wedged between the clip and the frame. Ballistics experts matched it to the bullets taken from Dorothy's body. Later retellings can't agree on the calibre, with some saying .32 and others .38, but the court record is clear that it was the weapon that killed her.
The saw was even more damning. It was covered in tissue, bone and fat along nearly its whole length, and it had the initials A E scratched into it. Those letters had clearly been there for a long time. This was Arthur's own saw from his own toolbox.
The bone fragments went to the technical director of the LAPD's Scientific Crime Investigation Laboratory, who ran a spectrographic analysis. It picked up calcium, magnesium, boron and a trace of copper, but no phosphorus, and the defence leapt on that to argue nobody had proved it was human bone. This was proper 1940s forensics, the same era you can see in these vintage crime scene photos from the LAPD archives, and it was a long way from DNA.
There's also a photo in the Los Angeles Public Library collection showing investigators at the Eggers home while the search was under way.
Confession, Retraction and a Very Different Story
Eggers confessed, then took it back. By the time he got to court, he'd settled on a new version. He said he got home from his shift at about 1am, saw a man leaving the house and found Dorothy undressed in the bedroom. There was a confrontation. He grabbed a gun from the chiffonier, they struggled in the bathroom and it went off. He claimed he only remembered one shot.
After that, he said, he sat on the toilet crying, then drove to Long Beach and stayed there until daylight. He didn't call for help because, according to him, he didn't know how badly she was hurt. As for the gun and the saw, he claimed he'd found them in the screen room days later and got rid of them because he thought someone was trying to frame him.
His story about the rings changed too. First he said he'd taken them off her body. Then he said he'd found them in a bureau drawer. He told the court he'd sold them because colleagues suspected him and he was worried they'd implicate him if they were found at home.
Even if a jury had swallowed the idea of an accidental shot, there was the rest of it to explain. Dorothy had been shot twice, not once. Somebody had cut off her head and hands, wrapped her in the family blanket, driven her into the mountains and dumped her. Then her husband had filed a missing person report, lied about her height, sold her rings under a fake name and flogged her car with a forged signature. None of that looks like panic. It looks like a plan.
The Trial and the Jury That Got Sent Home
The case was a big story in Los Angeles. Press photographers from the Herald Examiner caught Eggers in court in his spectacles and a conservative suit, and the trial photographs held by the Los Angeles Public Library are still worth a look. A year later the same city would be gripped by another mutilation case when the Black Dahlia was found in Leimert Park, and that one has never been solved.
His lawyer, James A. Starritt, ran with the accident story and a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury rejected the accident and convicted him of first-degree murder, without any recommendation of mercy. The Library's archive even holds a press shot catalogued simply as Convicted of murder.
Then something unusual happened. Before the sanity hearing, one juror said she had a closed mind on the issue, and the foreman signalled that if they were kept on, they'd never agree. The trial judge dismissed that jury and swore in a brand new one just to decide whether Eggers had been sane. The defence objected. The second jury found him sane, and he was sentenced to death.
The Appeal
Death sentences in California went automatically to the state Supreme Court. On 3 October 1947, the court handed down People v. Eggers, 30 Cal.2d 676, written by Justice Douglas Edmonds.
The defence argued there wasn't enough to show premeditation, and that swapping juries for the sanity hearing had tainted the whole thing. The court disagreed on both counts. It said the jury was entitled to weigh everything Eggers did after the shooting, from the mutilation to the rings, and that the judge had every right to replace a jury that couldn't reach a decision. The conviction and the death sentence stood.
San Quentin, 15 October 1948
Eggers spent his last months on death row at San Quentin. His prison mug shot, held by the California State Archives, shows him as inmate number A4145. Governor Earl Warren, who'd later become Chief Justice of the United States, signed the death warrant, as Executed Today notes.
On the morning of 15 October 1948, Arthur Eggers was put to death in the gas chamber. He was 54. Find a Grave lists his dates as 1894 to 1948. California's gas chamber stayed in use for decades afterwards, and other states' versions came under fire too, as the case of Jimmy Lee Gray in Mississippi showed in 1983.
Dorothy's head and hands were never found.
Why the Case Still Holds Up
There wasn't one big breakthrough here. It was a pile of small mistakes, and every attempt to cover his tracks created a new one.
He took her face and fingerprints and forgot about her feet. He moved her body 60 miles but left blood in the garage, the bathroom and the trunk. He cleaned the car and then sold it to a deputy. He got rid of the rings but used a fake name, which only made it look worse. He threw away the saw, but it had his initials on it. And the missing person report that was meant to make him look like a worried husband landed on the same day the body hit the papers.
Detectives in 1946 had no DNA, no CCTV and no phone records. They had doctors' notes, ballistics, a blood test, a spectrograph and a man who couldn't keep his story straight. That turned out to be plenty.
Remembering Dorothy
A lot of retellings lean heavily on the claims about Dorothy's private life, sometimes treating them as an established motive. They're not. They came from Arthur, the man on trial for her murder, and the court recorded them as his claims rather than proven fact. Some write-ups go even further with lurid gossip that has no source at all.
What's actually known is simpler. Dorothy Armand Lee Eggers was 42. She lived in a house in Temple City with her husband, two nieces and a lodger. She was shot twice, her body was mutilated and dumped in the mountains, and her own possessions were sold off within days. The man who did it tried hard to make her disappear completely.
He failed. A bunion gave her name back, and she deserves to be remembered as more than the headless body in the papers.
Further Reading
Famous Crimes the World Forgot by Jason Lucky Morrow covers the Eggers case alongside other vintage murders that slipped out of public memory. Find it on Amazon
Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook collects real Los Angeles crime photographs from the 1920s to the 1940s, the same era and city as this case. Not for the squeamish. Find it on Amazon
As an Amazon Associate, Utterly Interesting earns from qualifying purchases.
